The story is actually interesting, about hominid fossils found in (east European) Georgia indicating that diaspora patterns of our early primate cousins were very different than currently thought. However, this certainly doesn’t "overturn" anything about evolution. Instead, if it pans out, it will be another piece of the vast puzzle that is human prehistory. That’s how science works.

It’s obvious that the headline was written in an attempt to garner attention by hyperbolizing an otherwise already-cool story. Of course, the Daily Mail is well-known for this sort of shenanigans. You’d be better off getting your science news elsewhere. Where, you ask? I want to say one word to you. Just one word. Are you listening?

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I just read this earlier, and I thought it referred to the US State of Georgia. It is only as you get into the article, and see the map, that one realizes he is talking about the former Soviet Republic of Georgia. If I were a Creationist, the headline enough would have been enough to make me wet myself with glee. However, isn’t this the nature of science? When new evidence arises, it causes us to re-think and re-examine theories and realize that, as you say, the diaspora patterns were different than previously thought.

The idiot at the Daily Mail has a fig leaf of plausibility – it could overturn the current theory of hominid migrations into Europe, which is a theory of modern human evolution. It’s not sensationalism with no regard for facts. It’s just deception.

The thing with blogs is that they’re similar to editorial pieces – you know there’s going to be some bias there, and they (generally) don’t pretend to be completely objective like mainstream news does.

Everyone’s biased a little, and generally it’s the people who pretend they aren’t biased at all that actually have the most extreme biases.

Nice to see the creationists (and the “ancient alien Gods” crowd) getting dinged hard in the comments for the article. So much so that they’re having to turn the negative red down arrow against their comments into a badge of prideful honor.

Blogs generally don’t do reporting, i.e. speak with relevant experts on a per-story basis, extract key information from those interviews, organize that information so an audience can understand it, and majorly stick out necks in some cases. Key word: generally.

What blogs most often do is comment on reporting, offer extra insights into that story/topic, or simply bring reports to the attention of others.

I think most readers don’t realize is that almost all stories these days (science stories, anyways) come directly from institutions at the hands of public affairs/public information officers. Reporters — in a rush to “be first” and drastically increase page views — change the tone, style, and add a new sentence or two to press releases. And that’s it.

In the rare event that there’s 30 minutes or so, news org employees may be able to call one person up for comment and write their own stuff. Been there, done that, and my sense is that it hasn’t gotten better since I took a big step out of that simply crazy arena.

For those commenting on reporting done by blogs, I’ll note that this is precisely what I do when I write about astronomy and space issues here. In general, I get the info first hand from the journal paper if I can, and as a scientist and professional astronomer I usually have enough knowledge to write about the topic as well.

Aside from the sensationalism in the headlines, the content seems to be rubbish, too. A 1.8 million year old hominid in Europe? This is not new. We’ve known for quite some time that Homo erectus left Africa a long, long time ago, and that none of the modern human populations are descended from them (DNA shows this beyond a reasonable doubt).

Off-topic but freakin’ amazing
Just watched the ISS go over, with an expected magnitude of -3.4
But the heck with that. It flared to at *least* -10 a few seconds after it appeared.
I thought the -8 Iridium flare I saw was bright, but this was insane.
I love heavens-above! What a great site for sights

I happen to be in the middle of some self-education on paleoanthropology (whew!) after reading “The First Human” by my close personal friend, Ann Gibbons (no smiley, I’ve known her for decades). It would seem that the writer of this newspaper piece was long on hype and short on research (so what else is new?). Java Man (a variant on H. erectus) was discovered in 1891 and has been dated to more than a million years old. If they were in eastern Asia by 1.2 mya, why is it so surprising that the were still thousands of miles closer to Africa 600,000 years before that?

BTW, “The First Human” is a great read if you have any curiosity at all about where we came from. It’s not so much about paleoanthropology itself as it is a collective story about the scientists who are currently leaders in the field and what they go through to practice it. I’ve been following it up with “The Last Human” which shows reconstructions of what the earlier hominids may have looked like starting with the Ardipithicus and continuing up to the present H. sapien. The last human of the title is, of course, us since we’re the only specie of the genus left. If you’re going to read this one, though, read Ann’s book first to give you a needed background on the subject.

And as for blogs being a good source for science news and in depth information, I’m going to agree with Phil and counter the criticisms thusly:

“In my experience, most blogs don’t do any actual reporting. They just comment on reporting done by others.”

Sometimes I will do actual reporting, asking for interviews with the NCSE, the Texas Freedom Network, a space tourist and once upon a time even Phil who for some odd reason decided to accept my request. =)

But it’s a matter of budget and standing. I don’t have the time, the cachet or the cash to track down all the primary sources I want and put together a story due next week. That’s old school reporting and as anyone who worked in the news biz will tell you, it’s expensive. So instead I end up doing a fair bit of commentary and secondary research, much of it being fact checking and correcting errors made by publications that are supposed to know better.

Still, I will take time and look at the source data and the original papers, sticking to topics I know and understand well enough to provide a qualified comment. And of course, I do have to mention that since anyone can start a blog nowadays, you have to be careful who you read on scientific matters and never take what you see as gospel.

“What blogs most often do is comment on reporting, offer extra insights into that story/topic, or simply bring reports to the attention of others.”

Dave, considering how you described the mainstream news publishing process, that’s our value as bloggers. Today’s journalistic institutions decided to stop half-way at reporting the story. We’re there to do the analysis, the fact-checking and the other heavy lifting that comes with an important article.

Does that include blogs like the climate change denialist blogs? How about anti-vax blogs? How do people know what blogs are worth reading? I’m told (I don’t care to check the veracity) that many people make use of things like “digg” but people skew statistics and ‘bury’ stories because they have some agenda. Obviously the public at large and people with a bias cannot be trusted to provide useful information. So who you gonna call?

I don’t think this conflicts with the prevailing wisdom – it’s been known for a long time that earlier homo species left Africa for Europe and the Middle East long ago. The neandertals were there long before humans, why not homo erectus?

I had the pleasure this summer to actually visit areas in northern Armenia (bordering Georgia) with recently uncovered tools of Homo Erectus (Homo Georgicus?), probably of the same make dating to approximately 1.8 million years. Papers on the subject have yet to be published because access to Western archaeologists is only just becoming relatively common. Basically, what you can say about Georgia, you can say about Armenia as well.
Dmanisi, where the skulls were found is approximately 20 kilometers away from the Armenia border and an amazing landscape of canyons, small limestone caves, forests, and rolling hills.

However, if you want to be pedantic, the area of Georgia where the skulls are found is South of the Europe/Asia divide, and technically considered part of Asia. Geographically, the North-Western segment of Asia has nominative difficulties. What do you call the area South of the Caucuses Divide, North of the Zagros mountains of Iran, West of the Caspian, and East of Anatolia? I guess Transcaucasia, but then, you’d be leaving out the Armenian highlands (othewise known as Eastern Anatolia). Generally, the initial outward migration led to a wintering limit at the Caucasus. I propose calling this area Hurromontania, since it’s mountainous and influenced by the Hurrians of the middle Bronze Age.

While I can see your issue with the Daily Mail, your point is too general, Phil. Not that print articles are perfect, but I think you’re taking one bad paper and applying it to everyone. You are especially taking as your basis a UK paper, which often are much more editorial in style than US papers.

Here is an example of what I feel you did in reverse, which by the same logic shows that bloggers are the worst science reporters:

Now, I don’t think this is typical of all bloggers, but should it be an example of all of them? If I read an anti-vaxxer blog on Huffington Post, does that mean that all blogs are scientifically worthless? As all blogs are not equal, the same is true of scientific reporting.

In this case I’m not sure we can blame the headline writer for a bad headline. It seems to me that the headline lifts a quote from the main body of the story. In the main body of the article right beneath the picture of the skull we read: “Archaeologists have unearthed six ancient skeletons dating back 1.8 million years in the hills of Georgia which threaten to overturn the theory of human evolution.” Perhaps it’s a case of the journalist and the headline writer meaning two different things but to purely blame the headline writer doesn’t seem fair in this case.

Hilarious stream, I have to say!
And I will also say that the only reason I read this far is because of the headline. Perfect!!
I wonder if headline writers are making less these days due to the economic downturn and the effect on the newspaper industry…”you get what you pay for” sound familiar?

Phil, you did a great job with this one! Thanks for catching my attention…..

I started reading this blog because of my interest in astronomy. I found my self reading and enjoying what many others complained were off-topic posts. Keep up the good work Phil. Your allegedly off-topic posts more often than not cause me to read the science behind the posts. This was one of them. Now I know lots about hominid fossils and little about what I want to teach my kids tomorrow. Thanks Phil, thanks a lot.

I would agree with Phil IF I get to do the poking with the sharp stick. The local tabloid rag just phoned while I was typing the 1st paragraph offering me a month’s free paper if I get a year’s subscription. I explained that the most intellectual writing in the paper is found on the comics page and the most accurate information are the sports scores. The guy thanked me and asked if I wanted the special deal.

Buzz in this case the line I was referencing appears in the text below the picture, but it is not part of the caption to the picture. I meant it to be more of a visual reference since page or paragraph numbering isn’t available for a more precise reference.

The idiot at the Daily Mail has a fig leaf of plausibility – it could overturn the current theory of hominid migrations into Europe, which is a theory of modern human evolution.

Then again, the recent cladistic analysis of H. floresiensis overturns this as well. [Which I won’t link, to get around the spam filter.]

Earlier multifactor analysis placed floresiensis close to australopithecines. And the cladistic analysis places it as either split off between H. rudolfensis and H. habilis or as split off from the later.

This is presumably consistent, as for example Leakey claims from his finds that habilis and erectus are coexistent and AFAIU thinks it likely that habilis was an australopithecine. (A. garhi made tools too and would properly then be a Homo as I understand the definition of it.)

In any case, unless the unlikely happened that the earlier (but perhaps partly overlapping) habilis migrated later, erectus wasn’t first out of Africa.